Infowhores

Alex Jones appeared on Judge Napolitano’s Fox show a few weeks ago, talking about “globalists” and how Obama is taking away our freedom, and how finally Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and Michael Savage (!) are catching on to what Alex Jones has been saying for years, etc.

But do you know what Alex Jones never mentioned? 9/11. He said not a word about how the 9/11 attacks were an inside job.

Now, if you’re at all familiar with what Alex Jones has been saying and doing for the last eight years, you know that 9/11 is a central aspect of his thinking. For him to go on Fox and not mention 9/11 is an unbelievable bit of theater, because it means not mentioning the most important aspect of his own stated world view in the last decade.

It’s self-evident at this point that Fox wouldn’t put Alex Jones on the air to talk about how Obama and Hilary Clinton are part of the scary globalist conspiracy unless he promised not to say anything about 9/11 being an inside job. For those who are new to Alex Jones, he therefore comes off as another soldier in the wingnut rebellion. But those of us who aren’t new to Alex Jones are supposed to think, I can only suppose, that 9/11 no longer matters now that Bush is gone. It would take a severe case of myopia to believe such a thing, but readers of Alex Jones are not generally known for their critical thinking.

I am actually a 9/11 skeptic. I don’t believe the official story, and I don’t think that atrocity has been properly investigated. The collapse of the WTC7 building still makes no sense to me, and there’s a lot else that stinks about the case. Nevertheless, I could always tell the difference between a sincere investigator of the facts like David Griffin, and a self-promoting huckster like Jones.

It may seem ridiculous for me to be even spending time discussing Alex Jones, but the fact is I’ve know many people in the online community who follow him and send me links from his Infowars sight. Occasionally, very occasionally, there’s been some good information in the links. Naively, I assumed he was on the left, albeit of the deranged variety. But his willingness to go on Fox without mentioning 9/11, and implicitly praising neofascists like Glenn Beck and Michael Savage to boot, proves me to have been woefully mistaken.

Alex Jones is a right wing troll. And a whore. Not mentioning his belief that 9/11 was an inside job, so that he could get on Fox, proves him to be a whore. The truth, as it turns out, doesn’t matter to Alex Jones. The only thing that matters to him is Alex Jones.

He’s also the worst thing that could have happened to the 9/11 truth movement. It seems inevitable nowadays, though, that conspiracy, even when the suspicion of one is well-founded, is going to attract the unscrupulous exploiters of fear, who end up discrediting everyone else involved. The larger issue involved here is that conspiracy, such as it is, represents only a symptom of a systemic problem rather than a cause.

Meanwhile the incredible hysteria of the hard right drives the Republican Party further into the ground, possibly destroying it forever. I don’t have any interest in preserving that institution, but at the same time we shouldn’t underestimate the mischief that brownshirt-style rhetoric and a lynch mob mentality can cause in this country. Every civilized person should be speaking out against this barbarism, but instead the maniacs seem to have an open mike on the national stage.